097: How to improve your gut health – with Dr Daniel

Raise your hand if your gut is feeling bloated, gassy, or is just plain ANGRY at you right now? ’Tis the season for super rich, super sugary, and super indulgent food and drinks that are totally throwing your gut health outta whack! Trust me, I’m right there with ya and I’m calling in the BIG GUNS to help.

My special guest today is Dr. Daniel and he’s simplifying how to improve your gut health. No matter if it’s the holidays or you’ve had a spell of eating all the wrong things for a long period of time… if your digestion is off, EVERYTHING is off in your body, am-I-right?! So how do we turn this ship and get back to center? Dr. Daniel is gonna sort us out without prescription drugs or guilt and shame.

Here’s how.

Dr Daniel simplifies how to improve your gut health.

In this episode, you will learn:

• What ‘functional medicine’ is and why improving our gut health is so darn important 
• What the ‘Gut-Health Axis’ is and how our stomach affects nearly every other part of our body and mind
• What the warning signs are when your gut health isn’t doing so great
• The 4 primary triggers of stress and how to overcome them, especially during the holidays
• How to take the first step towards a positive change, including how to do ‘the elimination technique’
• Let’s talk about poop! – what to look for and how to track if things are improving (or not)
• What foods are better to eat and which are best to reduce down or avoid
• What are the other simple steps you can take to improve the health of your gut beyond what you eat and drink

Look, I’ve had a bit of a love/hate relationship with my body since I was really, really little. Wishing my tummy was smaller, feeling ashamed of my curves, and hating that I felt bloated 99% of the time. 

Only in the last couple of years have I started to really, truly understand what’s happening inside my body, including my stress levels, my hydration and nutrition… and how that was affecting my digestion. When you start to focus there, it’s incredible how other aspects of your physical health and mental wellness start to improve, as well.

When you know better, you do better.

And like me, you’ll stop feeling like you’re in a battle with your body, but learning that when you improve your gut health, you unlock a greater potential deep down inside that is fascinating.

#DoTheThing!

Links, books and apps mentioned:

Resource: the Gut-Health Axis – Dr Daniel

Resource: the Bristol Stool Chart: what kind of poop do you have? – WebMD

Quiz: the ACE Quiz: Adverse Childhood Experiences – NPR

Resource: How to pick a high quality probiotic – Dr Daniel

Book: Integrative Gastroenterology (Weil Integrative Medicine Library) – Gerard E. Mullin, Marvin Singh, Alyssa Parian, John Clarke

Book: The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides

Podcast: How to make self-care ‘non-negotiable’ through cooking, featuring Carly Pollack – The Simplifiers Podcast

Favorite quotes from this episode:

[06:23] “Everybody knows that food is one of the most important things for being healthy. You eat that food, [then] your digestive system has the task of extracting nutrients from that food, which then you use to be able to do your daily activities. So a lot of the precursors to how your body’s going to function… in order for things to work well are going to begin in the gut. It’s literally the synthesis. It’s the factory right where, where everything else is then going to be impacted.“

– Dr Daniel

 

[10:49] “80% of our immunity from our immune cells resides within the digestive tract.”

– Dr Daniel

 

[15:48] “33% of the population at any point in time has an infection. And yet they don’t know about it. Also, most of those infections, they happen from our environment, not from traveling to some other third world country or going on vacation. And so most of these infections are in our backyard, basically.” 

– Dr Daniel

 

[18:25] “Health is not incessantly worrying about being healthy. We have to remember that, right? That we can’t just stress ourselves out to be so restricted in our diet, that we have no joy and pleasure in life.”

– Dr Daniel

 

[19:00] “I’m a diet agnostic. I don’t have a particular diet that I recommend. Certainly for gut problems, I do have places where I start, but that is never going to be the end of the final destination. For every patient, [we must] identify what is the most diverse diet that somebody could be on that’s not causing problems.”

– Dr Daniel

 

[21:06] “A lot of times humans are horrible at recall, by the way. So I like for my patients do ‘food, mood, poop’ journaling. So literally writing down the foods that they eat.”

– Dr Daniel

About Dr Daniel

Dr. Daniel, DC, FCN, FDN, CFMP, is a doctor of natural medicine, clinical diagnostic nutritionist and Functional Medicine practitioner, with a passion to help people achieve Health, without a prescription. 

He operates one of the largest virtual Functional Medicine practices in the US.